Search engines have been developed that allow users to search for documents on a network such as the Internet by submitting a search query consisting of one or more search terms. One obstacle to obtaining the proper search results is that users often misspell the terms in their query. To alleviate this problem, many search engines perform spell checking on the query and provide suggestions to the user for correcting their search query.
Some systems that perform this spelling correction rely on a source channel model. The source channel model attempts to find a candidate alternative query that has the maximum probability given the input query. This probability is determined by determining two separate probabilities: the conditional probability of the input query given the candidate; and the probability of the candidate. The probability of the candidate is typically determined using a statistical language model that provides the probability that a search query will contain the sequence of words found in the candidate. The conditional probability of the input query given the candidate is determined using an edit distance between the input query and the candidate query.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.